Pax East - Boston, March 22-24th. They don't have any tables available for non-gaming groups and are rather expensive. Perhaps we should have a party in one of the hotel rooms and hand out invites. Could have folks wearing t-shirts that say: Ask me how the Pirate Party is protecting your freedom"?

Pirate Info Conference

We will probably get more people this year, so adequate space. At least 100 people.

Good location that is easy to get to and accessible to people with disabilities

Good access to internet and electrical outlets

Good lighting

Meeting Minutes

Events. We've scheduled two major events for this year: a party
conference in June, and a cryptocurrency conference in late
September/early October. Last year, the conference was probably our
best event.

We've also got the Pride march, Freedom Rally, TSA out of the MBTA,
Aaron Schwartz memorial hackathon, #IDP13, and a cryptoparty

At the Aaron Schwartz protest, there were discussions about group
outreach, upcoming events, and organizing support for Aaron's law.

Campaign Finance Reports. We filed end-of-year campaign finance
reports. We had to amend our first two filings, but all that work is
done now. The campaign finance reports are available on the wiki, and
via OCPF. We raised $1900 in 2012; $600 in 2011. We spent $1600
in 2012. A good portion of income was in-kind contributions. The
party conference came in under budget. Various events came in over
budget. Fundraising, outreach, and internet were below budget. We
don't have to decide the next year's budget now.

We need to get candidates, and we're still struggling for an
identity. If we answered those questions, we might be able to get
more funding. If we ran candidates, the financial picture would be a
lot different. This is something we should plan out.

Year end Review. Jamie put together a year-end review. We did
something just about every month in 2012. Maybe three times as many
events as last year. We had 12 people in pride parade, 9 people in
the freedom rally, several lunches, and events with other people.

Image and Messaging. If the cryptoparty gets bigger, could it
attract feds? It probably already has. People are getting trouble
with the law over things like this, and they're sick of it. People
see things in the news like Aaron Schwartz, and CISPA, and people are
interested. We need a response to things like that.

We could focus on defending the internet. People will get up in arms
over that. We have to be ready for the next CISPA or SOPA, and be the
next flag bearer. We should brand ourselves as defending the
internet. If we have a radical response and it's newsworthy, people
will get involved.

It's important to get the messaging right, so when the event happens,
the messaging is there. We send a lot of stuff on twitter and
Facebook, but the blog isn't getting a lot of attention, mainly due to
lack of resources.

People that Follow me on twitter as a rails developer were asking
about Aaron Schwartz. It hit home to a lot of non-activists.

We need to be prepared. Feinstein had all of her stuff written before
Sandy Hook took place. When the incident happened, they were ready.

The biggest things -- the most draconian and most restrictive -- are
still in the future. We should be ready for them. It's now illegal
to unlock phones without your carrier's permission. (Jailbreaking is
still legal). In theory, this is a piece of news we should be railing
against.

Blogging. If we could put more stuff in the blog, then more people
can feed it into Facebook, twitter.

Should we have a workshop on wordpress? Sure, anyone want to
organize?

Are there a set of guidelines that we should stay within (when writing
blog posts)? Should there be a review process? Should people just
mail text to info@masspirates.org? This is becoming an organizational
thing; maybe we need a committee.

activists@masspirate.org could be a place to provide feedback on
drafts for blog posts.

What about liquid feedback? We put an honest effort into getting
liquid feedback up and running, but it hasn't worked for us. Let's
not give up on liquid feedback yet; let's pester the developers some
more, and get it working.

After the meeting, we'll grant blog access to people who want it. It
would be nice if blog posts were more up to date, we had more sticky
content, and if the content were better organized.

The German pirate party released a wordpress theme. Perhaps we should
adopt that.

The more stuff we post, the more attention we'll get.

Forums would be nice, but they'd require a dedicated admin (to clean
up spam and such).

Hosting. We've looked at a few services (Bluehost), but there were
many service that weren't available. There's a co-op (Mayfirst) that's
$200/year. And maybe $50/year for the SSL certificate.

Steve describes Mayfirst. They're a co-op that provides hosting and
tech to the broader left. Based in Brooklyn and Mexico city. They
have a "go get a warrant policy". They're good people.

There are VPN affiliate programs, where a person signs up, and part of
their subscription becomes a donation. Private Internet Access is a
good provider, but there are lots of others. We could use this as a
fundraiser, or offer it as a member benefit. Teaching people why VPNs
are necessary could be a recruitment tool.

We should get back to making video tutorials about how people can
protect themselves. They'd make great blog posts.

Are there any objections to moving over to Mayfirst? No objections,
sounds good.

Member Survey. Is anyone willing to tabulate the survey responses?
Sevan volunteers.

Activities. There were a lot of talks at last year's pirate
conference. It was useful, but there wasn't any decision making. We
didn't decide positions or elect people. We need to pick a location.

The cryptocurrency conference isn't for a while.

What about the St. Patrick's day parade for peace? We could dress up
in uniforms and Guy Fawkes masks. On second thought, maybe not Guy
Fawkes masks; that image is too associated with anonymous.

(We have an amusing discussion about parades and street theater.)

We need to increase event participation. That's our crying need.

People are sympathetic towards anonymous. Even if we're not
associated with them, we could use their support. We have a
different, but compatible, vision of activism.

This goes aback to the identity of the organization. Creating
identity through events is a problem. Events don't identify you as a
group.

Issues and Identity. When the pirate party was founded in Sweden,
there were three issues: open culture, government transparency, and
privacy. They never thought it would extend beyond those three
issues. Everyone is this room is concerned with those core issues.
But there are other things, like the economy and education. That's a
tricky prospect. Democrats and Republicans build coalitions to win
elections. We have core values. This has to be a slow, deliberative
process.

Open Government and education are local issues we could put energy
into. There are only two groups in society who can't vote: people in
the prison system, and people in the education system. In some
places, there are literally school to prison pipelines.

We discuss idea of having a youth pirate party. A lot of young people
don't vote because they feel like they're choosing between idiot
number one, and idiot number two.

There's been huge tech changes in last few years. Some people don't
go to church because they don't see the need for it. Young people are
the only ones who know how society works. And we still have old
people clinging to power. And, a lot of the young people in politics
think like the old people.

What if we made lowering the drinking age an issue for the pirate
party? Does hemp have more activism than lowering the drinking age?
Yes. The hemp issue attracts people from a wide range of ages. Since
the 1980's Gallup polls on marijuana legalization have gone up in a
straight line. It's finally gotten to the point where > 50% support
legalization of marijuana. The same is true of many of the issues
that the pirate party stands for. They're generational, and we'll
get them eventually.

Hemp is one of the most abundant resources on the planet, and there
are lots of ways to use it. It's also an environmental issue.

Activist Toolkits. We make at big splash at big events. At smaller
events, we go as individuals, and not as much as a collective. In
Germany, pirates would bring flags. Flags are great symbols, and a
great way to show who we are (during events).

Is there someone willing to look at where to get flags made? There
are companies that make custom flags, and it won't break the bank. We
could print a few a try to sell them. We could think about having a
stock of stuff, and we send them to people holding events. (Zazzle,
Cafe press?) A toolkit, where we can give `packages' of stuff to
contributors. A pirate party in a box for local organizers.

What would you put in a toolkit? The stuff you'd need for an event.
Or the stuff you need to table an event. A mission statement for
local groups.

Demographics. What are our demographics? Nerdy, engineer types, a
lot of males. How can we expand this? People struggling to pay
loans, and such? How does that connect? What kind of answers do we
have for them? What about stop and frisk? That's something we care
about, and it affects people in lower income areas.

We came up with a concept of doing a FOIA request on some of our own
members, to one of our local fusion centers, to see what we get
back.

Boycotts & Intellectual Property. We should declare a voluntary
boycott of intellectual property. Not a complete boycott, but do
little things where you can. The pirate party is against the concept
of intellectual property monopolies. How do you lower your IP
footprint? And how do you do this without spending thousands and
thousands of dollars to prove you're innocent.

Six strikes plan? This is a private agreement that ISPs have made
with Movie makers. After six suspected downloads, the ISP reduces or
cuts off your internet access.

Party Committees. We had talked about forming different committees.
That might be a good way to get people involved, by giving them an
easy way to plug in. Committees can be small, starting with, say, two
people. The we can rotate between committees, so that people don't get
burned out.

Possible committees

policy and identity committee (Policy and identity are different things, but highly related).

IT committee (Steve, shidash, jamie, Joe)

welcoming/outreach committee (Lauren, Sevan, Lucy, Yecenia)

fundraising/media committee

dogfood and democracy committee (jamie, Eric)

Treasury (Lucy, steve, jamie)

Should we have committee reports at future meetings? Yes. That
might create some positive social pressure.

Political System. If we view ourselves as transcending the
existing political system, then we have to do that ourselves. We
have to lead by example. We do little things (posting IRC
transcript), but we need to do more. We should be the technology
leaders.

One congressman (Justin Amash) explains all of his votes on Facebook,
every single one. We should push other leaders to do the same thing.

Some legislators never read the legislation; they just read the
titles, and ask their interns to look at the legislation and suggest
hot to vote. Reading all of the bills takes an incredible amount of
time. What about crowdsourcing legislation?

I'd love to have the equivalent of "git blame" for the text of
legislation.

We can't tangibly change processes in congress, unless we have people
in congress to make the changes. We need to win political points, but
can we do this at the top of the pyramid.

Suppose we had 5% of registered voters. Then, we could all of these
things. Which of the things we've talked about would get us to 5%?
Once we hit 5%, there's a wider group of things we can do.

Some laws begin put forward could screw us. All of us. We can't
catch everything, but we should be up in arms about certain things.
Perhaps identify relevant bills, ask people to read them, and to
summarize what's in them.

Muckrock (?) uses a tool to crowd source drone research. We could
probably use the same tool for privacy research. We need voting
to know voting records for our legislators.

Have no-money Mike talk at our conference, about campaigning?

Would instant runoff voting also fall into the category of eating our
own dogfood? Yes.

People should be saying "this is how the pirate party did it at their
conference". If they don't, it's a missed opportunity.